Territory Labor has been loyally echoing federal Labor about the risks to the local economy, and have been free with predictions of a bad local recession. Photo: Rohan Thomson
If Tony Abbott and his ministers set out to take a big axe to Canberra, one might well argue that federal Labor gave them the mandate to do so. The only consistent part of the Labor campaign was that Abbott was going to cut public expenditure ''to the bone''. Abbott's denials were unavailing so far as Labor was concerned. Perhaps the electorate believed Rudd, not him, but thought a massacre appropriate.
Though you would hardly think that the people of Canberra are quaking. Territory Labor has been loyally echoing federal Labor about the risks to the local economy, and have been free with predictions of a bad local recession. Yet real estate prices across all sectors seem to be increasing, or at the least, holding up. That does not suggest that the ''market'' - the collective of all buyers - is expecting that houses will soon be cheaper, as hundreds, perhaps thousands are forced to leave town. And there does not appear to be a great deal of ordinary evidence of the population girding itself for a repeat of 1976 or 1996.
To the contrary, the suffering of a good many local businesses, such as it is, owes more to slowdown caused by the election itself, perhaps the greater this time because of the non-stop election mode most of the year. Once there is a result and the victors have taken their places, absorbed their briefs, dealt with a few urgent things or manifesto items, then got stuck into the routine business of governing, a good deal of the ordinary machinery of Canberra economic activity will gear upwards.
Most likely the number of people displaced from their jobs will be more than 1000, but the greater proportion of these will be political staffers who signed on for the duration and had no reasonable expectations of permanency, least of all in a government with such a bad reputation for doing things properly. Perhaps a few bureaucrats tagged as being especially close to Labor will fall - some voluntarily, from distaste - just as some did at the beginning and the end of the Howard regime. No doubt some caravans close to Labor will leave town looking for better pickings elsewhere.
But new caravans - eager for the pickings from a Coalition regime - will be coming, in many cases on return visits. And among the first things the new government will do, even before it looks over the balance sheet, will be to appoint a new raft of political staff and consultants - friends, relations and champions of their party, a good number of whom are experienced, from Howard days, in the ways of government. They will take up where they left off, and many, of course, will not even have to migrate, permanently, or by the week, to Canberra, given that they spent their off-time in the lobbies and the academies.
As we note the physical departure from the city of some politicians, minders, and some of the well-known Labor tree people, we often miss the fact that they are being replaced in the shop by an equal, and generally equally ravenous, number of fixers, organisers and suits from the other. Since many of these fraternise in different circles, this is a fact often missed.
The 1976 and 1996 recessions hit markets which were largely unprepared. Perhaps there was always going to be a curtain drawn on the Whitlam regime, but much of the local population, and much of the bureaucracy had not anticipated either the government's sacking in mid-term in 1975, or the fact that sooner or later someone was going to slow the Canberra land boom. That boom had been fuelled by annual population growth of about 10 per cent, creating a land development and housing industry about the same size as the public service, and when someone turned the tap off, the wailings and lamentations were long and deep.
Virtually the whole of Tuggeranong lay kerbed and guttered, sewered and electrified, but without residents, and it took a good time before the surplus capacity was sopped up. By then many badly burnt tradespeople had left, vowing never to return, and
when Canberra began picking up again, it proved very hard to recruit skilled building tradespeople.
John Howard came to power in 1996 promising very benign management, and denying he had any agenda to take an axe to anything, even the ABC. Perhaps the electorate believed him, or perhaps he was installed not so much because of this belief, but because voters had become heartily sick of the Labor Party after 13 years in office. In any event, the heavy pruning of Commonwealth expenditure had not been foreshadowed or warned against; it succeeded the discovery of a ''black hole'' and the confection of some sense of panic about deficits, debt and living beyond our means.
The impact on Canberra was particularly local and severe, though it was balanced by some able counter-cyclical spending by a Liberal ACT chief minister, some market manipulations by Howard designed to prop up commercial property owners (who, as ever, believe in the operation of free markets only for others), and, soon, by the way that the Howard regime came to require an ever bigger and wider bureaucracy.
The ''black hole'' political technique has also occurred in state administrations, particularly with Jeff Kennett in Victoria and Campbell Newman in Queensland, and, if on a much slower and more politically clever manner, with Barry O'Farrell in NSW. But Abbott will find it particularly difficult to pick up the script. This is not only because he has been so busy denying such an agenda, but because of the manner of the opposition's knowledge of, complicity in, and avowed plans for the economy as revealed during the campaign.
Abbott, moreover, based his attack on Labor (particularly on Julia Gillard) on the notion of the ''liar'' - and the breach of promise; it would be particularly difficult, even for this master dissembler, to insist that objective conditions had changed to the point where his previous promises were no longer operative. That may be a pity, because those who are going to be pushing and pulling the levers may need all the flexibility and capacity to adapt to circumstances as they can get.
The economy is in a state of change, and it is no disrespect to the expertise and experience of Treasury, or other players, to say that it is difficult to predict what is going to happen, whether in world trade, in the economies of significant partners (China, Europe, Japan and the US), in commodity prices, Australia's terms of trade, the exchange rate and interest rates as a tap incidentally moderating the inflow and outflow of overseas funds.
Domestically, but largely as a result of this, some nimble footwork is needed to cope with issues of structurally falling government revenue, differing economic conditions around the states, and, possibly, fresh recognition of the problems of translational migrations of profits. There are parts of south-eastern Australia (though not at least until now, including the ACT) on the edge of recession, or at least talking themselves into one, given the significance of business confidence in such things. Indeed one of the reasons why some of the opposition attacks on Labor deficits moderated to the merely rhetorical in the closing weeks of the campaign was that even some senior Coalition economic ministers believe the economy could do with a bit of stimulus, not the contraction that would be caused by a major assault on government spending.
The Coalition has been quite certain, and unequivocating, about the reduction, by attrition of the public service by about 12,000 people. If this is to be a separately managed campaign to other measures designed to rein in government expenditure, then I would expect that the attrition - or forced redundancy - could end up at twice that. Government departments are already shedding staff as a result of Labor efficiency dividends, ones that the Abbott government will compound with its already-announced further efficiency dividends. Cost cutting with a focus on the cost of administration is a bipartisan sport. From the point of view of local Liberal politicians, a good deal has been said about the capacity, or will, to resist or moderate the impact of such cuts, but perhaps we have paid all too little attention to the diligence with which our very own Labor members have served us in this regard, given the nature of the pruning that has taken place here over recent years.
But they might, in their defence, point out that the burdens have not been greater than the local economy can bear. This is not because people have not been displaced, functions pruned, programs slashed. Yet Canberra has the lowest rate of unemployment in Australia, and will probably still have even after these cuts have worked their way through.
It's been a lacklustre campaign, and, watching the largely unlamented fate of a Labor administration that never reached any great heights, I find it remarkable still how many opportunities it squandered. Rudd and Gillard, and Rudd, again, left completely unanswered the allegation that its big spending programs - particularly with school halls and roof insultation - were administrative nightmares, incompetently and inefficiently managed, the very symbol of government waste and mismanagement. If the Australian population now believes that, it was because the claim was never answered.
Likewise, six years of Labor has made it, like the Liberals before it, prisoners of the mindset of Department of Immigration culture - a culture that has not changed in significant respects for several decades. That culture affects not only how we regard refugees and human rights, and also is increasingly the cart pulling our Foreign Affairs and Defence horses. The department house-trains ministers even more effectively than does the Department of Veterans Affairs, and any idea that it is ministers - Labor or Liberal -who are calling the shots is illusory. In a curious way, it might be that Scott Morrison may end up proving their match, if only because, on the one hand, he might be said to absolutely epitomise everything they stand for, yet, on the other, has the ruthlessness, ambition and intellect to appreciate that it is all a game really, albeit a dirty one played with human lives. This was a campaign in which neither leader was able to go beyond platitudes in articulating any sort of vision of the future, and where the new prime minister never once said a thing he had not said, or had tested by focus groups, before the campaign. His self discipline was remarkable, as was that of his team. I don't expect that he will suddenly relax, but he must realise, sooner or later, that mere slogans, grabs or safe phrases will not be able to cover all the eventualities he will face. Government is one thing; governing is another.
But just as remarkable has been the self-discipline of Gillard and the other ministers Rudd displaced. We might hear some refreshing original - or suppressed - thoughts from these quarters in the week ahead. However badly Rudd goes, I doubt that Gillard could have done better, but with both, the crying and the pity should not be about the manner of their going, but the opportunities they squandered. And the biggest of these was to explain, promote and to sell whatever it was they, or a once-proud Labor movement, were all about.
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